Let Healthy Young Americans Go To College and Work

Younger people aren't immune to the coronavirus but they are less likely to die or be hospitalized because of it. Let them choose their own risk.


One of the many questions surrounding the national lockdown in reaction to the novel coronavirus is whether colleges and universities should be open for business as usual in the fall. In a refreshingly declarative op-ed for The New York Times, the president of Brown University, Christina Paxson, says "the reopening of college and university campuses in the fall should be a national priority."

She's absolutely right. In fact, it should be a national priority to open up as much of American society to younger people as soon as possible. Not only are they far more likely to survive COVID-19, they are the ones ultimately bearing much of the cost of the lockdown in terms of missed opportunities to learn and work.

Paxson's argument is at times explicitly self-interested, an observation that doesn't undercut her case. "Most colleges and universities are tuition dependent," she writes. "Remaining closed in the fall means losing as much as half of our revenue." She adds that spending on higher education shovels $600 billion toward GDP and that colleges and universities are major, reliable employers in every town and city where they exist. She's right, also, when she points out that however great it is to be able to conduct classes via Zoom and other videoconferencing services, such experiences are a far cry from the sort of intense learning experience students typically get from inhabiting traditional classrooms and moving around bustling campuses.

Any return to normalcy will, of course, require concessions to public health, including social distancing, wearing masks, reconfiguring dorms and dining halls, and prohibiting large gatherings in accordance with the evolving understanding of how the coronavirus spreads. But it's also true that younger people without underlying health conditions seem to be remarkably strong in the face of COVID-19. According to preliminary data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), just 0.001 percent of deaths from COVID-19 involved people under the age of 25 who had no underlying health conditions (see table 2) For comparison, the same figures show that people aged 85 and over with no other underlying conditions comprised 30 percent of deaths. Younger people aren't immune from the disease, but their rates of hospitalization are also small enough that students should be given the choice of whether to return.

Of course, colleges aren't the exclusive province of the young—faculty and staff are likely to be middle-aged and older—so different schools will need to come up with systems in which employees can opt out of being on campus or otherwise reduce their own likelihood of being exposed.

There is no easy way to keep younger and older Americans separate from one another. But there's no reason to punish the young and the healthy by subjecting them to the same draconian lockdown rules as the most susceptible among us. With real unemployment clocking in around 20 percent—a figure last seen during the Great Depression—younger people can invest in their education or take advantage of their relative immunity to fill what jobs might be available. Relatively young and poor Americans are already being screwed by entitlement programs and public-sector pensions that tax them to line the pockets of their older and wealthier counterparts. The least we can do is give younger folks the choice to go to college or out into the world.


NEXT: Joe Biden's Latest Campaign Trail Target Is Milton Friedman. But Why?


  1. Not sure why going in debt up to their eyeballs and mortgaging their entire future income is a particularly attractive option for young people.

    Yes – I understand that is easily the most attractive option for young people – as chosen by older people who either
    a)benefit from leeching off that future income stream in the pricing of their product or
    b)benefit from the desperation of those in debt up to their eyeballs re the pricing of ‘entry-level workers’
    c)benefit from existing asset prices being maintained at an artificially high level by coercing the young to buy into that debt-based model.

    There’s a whole bunch of ‘we must manage free markets so that those support the existing status quo of things’ here. Even if you don’t realize it. Personally I see a whole lot of value in obliterating the entire – go to college or else model for the 18-22 cohort.

    1. Well, this could be what it takes to push a lot of them over the edge.

      1. Wishful thinking.

        1. Maybe. But I’ve thought for a while now that there is a higher education bubble that’s going to burst before too long. If the “free college” crowd doesn’t get their way I think it’s likely still.

    2. Going to college massively increases future earnings. It’s entirely worth reasonable college loans to attend. Average college loan debt is less than 30k at graduation with a bachelor’s degree – considering average lifetime earnings will increase by over $1 million because of that bachelor’s degree, that’s a pretty good deal.

      (The truly grotesque college loan debt tends to belong to people going to law and medical school, who will earn even more over their lifetime because of those degrees).

      1. “Going to college massively increases future earnings.”

        That brings to mind a certain young lady who got two, count them, two, degrees from a northeastern college/university.
        She then went to work as a bartender.

        1. She did this as her father had just died and her mother needed cash and while she could make money from day one as a bartender, as a college grad, the average time of finding work was 3-6 months…and hen mom coudn’t wait that long.
          She went on to become the youngest US Congress member in history and today is famous worldwide for speaking truth to power, with not only graduating with honors in government and economics but with street creds and a perspective of the ordinary person.

          1. She’s not the youngest Congress member in history. Dozens of people have been elected at younger ages; the law makes the minimum age 25, and she was 29. Hell, people have been elected to Senate at 29.


          2. How long did she work as a bartender while she looked for that promising job with her college degree?

            You cannot be unaware of all the stupid things she has said and proposed. Unless you have your head so far up her ass…

      2. And yet – college didn’t used to attach itself to future earnings in order to extract that as rent.

        In 1946 – UPenn charged $545 in tuition/fees/books for undergrad and eg $465 for grad law school. This at a time when the average high school grad entering the workforce could prob earn $1200 or so per year. So yeah – it took some serious scrimping or maybe getting married or part-time study or working for a company that might pay for additional education or something to open the possibilities of an option besides just going straight to work after HS – but doable.

        Today – the same school charges $57k for undergrad tuition/fees and $68k for grad law school. When that same entry-level HS required job now pays less than 30k or so. And most companies that have a significant workforce of college-grads don’t even hire HS-grads anymore – so a ton of doors to the workforce have simply closed. And this diminished opportunity is now implicitly sold as a benefit of going to college – rather than as a fucking rigged playing field which is what it really is.

        It is amazing how this successful rent-seeking and leeching by colleges has become ‘accepted’ by people who purport to understand how markets work. It almost as if – the only people who advocate for free markets are in fact advocating for rent-seeking.

        1. Yes, credentialism. Probably the majority of value of degrees for most people.

          You want to de-escalate? Then stop enabling. Eliminate the fed support for student loans. Let institutes decide how to attract paying customers who have to spend their own money. Encourage departments to post earning potential (in that field) for each degree level. As you mentioned, the big problem is not professional degrees (with law being a stupid exception), the problem is advanced degrees in fields where the most likely path is becoming a professor in that field (and adding to academic bloat). A quick rule of thumb: if your grad program does not offer routine and generous TA and RA stipends, again professional degrees excepted, you are chasing the wrong career (unless you are independently wealth or can guarantee us that you will never complain about earning less than others).

          1. I can agree with that. But fact is that that change can not possibly occur without the destruction of the entrenched status quo happening first. Said destruction being:

            The ability for colleges to depend on a revenue stream that allows for both rent-seeking and information asymmetry (students who really have no idea what different degrees lead to as adults).

            The ability for employers to costlessly move their entry-level hiring from 18/HS/debt-free to 22/college/indebted while not sabotaging their own recruiting pipeline at all.

            Breaking those two shouldn’t be a goal for any policy. Neither however should any truly libertarian free-market advocate lose a nanosecond of sleep about any economic decline that is taking out those rent-seekers and beneficiaries of distortions and those haves who have spent decades protected from even piddly recessions.

            And yet – what we have is ‘advocates for free markets’ who have seamlessly switched from ignoring all those distortions and status quo barriers to entry/exit to now advocating a specific GDP level – just like good Keynesians except that what they are defending is the privileged in the old system. Panicking at a recession. And even if they tut-tut a bit at the bailouts/subsidies, it is entirely idle clucking. Because in truth, the very act of panicking at recession – as if growth must always be continual, persistent, and continue to benefit those who are currently benefiting – is utterly abhorrent to actual economic change driven by actual FREE markets.

        2. LMAO!!! What’s funny is how you associate education in the country as “free markets”….??? That’s gotta be sarcasm right?

          1. I’m pretty sure his whole point is that education is not a free market in this country.

      3. Evidently on reason all the boomers on reason didn’t get the note that you don’t have to go to harvard to get a valuable degree. For some reason they think colleges are nothing but “libral re-education camps” . I think most of these idiots never went to college at all. I went to college 15 years ago and max 2% of the people even gave a shit about “libral” politics. They’re just loud mouths. The other 98% know that professor opinions are bullshit and they just need to get their paper certificate to get a job.

        1. Doesn’t really explain why college kids vote Democrat in such large numbers, if they really thought their professors were full of BS.

          They are more like fish in a fish bowl. They are surrounded and enveloped by their left-wing environment, and they don’t really think about what it’s like outside of it. And outside of that cocoon, they are like a fish out of water.

    3. You lied in the roundup thread JFree.

      1. JesseSPAZ never lies!!!

        JesseSPAZ comment: “He can fire political appointees for any fucking reason he wants.”
        Jesse’s over-archingly lusting after the super-powers of the Trumptatorship YET AGAIN!!!
        Trump can fire them for not assigning their entire paychecks to Trump… For not licking Trump’s balls as much as JesseSPAZ does… For turning down Trump’s requests for then to perform personal murder-for-hire… For having fucked Stormy Daniels out of turn, when it was Trump’s turn… For Air Force Captain-Sir-Dude-Sir-Pilot-Sir refusing orders to go and bomb Nancy Pelosi’s house…

        Just when I was rooting for JesseSPAZ to turn from his evil ways, he doubles down on Trumptatorship-worship AGAIN!

        And then JesseSPAZ rags on others for telling fibs! Go figure! And he NEVER takes back his lies!

      2. You lied in the roundup thread JFree.

        About yo mama?

        On edit -whatever. You fucking stupid DeRp.

        1. JFree?
          Stuff your PANIC!!! flag up your ass, stick first, sit on it and spin. Please. You have made an absolute ass of yourself for weeks with your cowardly whining, lies, bullshit and hoping others were locked in so you might not catch a cold.
          Let me suggest what you might do to the benefit of humanity, you fucking cowardly piece of shit:
          Fuck off and die.

          1. If I stop posting, you will lose your entire reason for existence. Which is apparently to stalk comments posting the samesame over and over and over and over and over and over and over.

            You should be more grateful. I am keeping you alive.

    4. And many of of us see a whole lot of value in you fucking off and dying, you pathetic piece of cowardly shit.

    5. The fact is, however that even younger people have become seriously ill, and actually died of the Covid-19 Virus. Also, the refusal on the part of a lot of the younger people who go to college and work to do social distancing like they should could set things back again, because they could knowingly or unknowingly infect other people, especially grandparents or parents. A lot of these younger people don’t give a shit, either, which is disgusting.

  2. When this whole thing started, I remember talking with a couple of people and we were all wondering why you would take a bunch of kids spreading the infection on campus with very little danger, and then ship them all back across the country to go live at home with their older, and more vulnerable parents. It seemed like the PERFECT strategy to spread the virus around the country.

    While it would be tinfoil hat territory (…right?) to say this was intentional, I do think it was bordering on gross negligence. Universities had already gotten tuition payments from the students, and they did not want to incur health costs. In addition, their faculty were on the graying side and didn’t want to be infected. In other words, all of the Universities’ interests aligned AGAINST the interests of managing the pandemic at large.

    A better system would have had the universities stay open, and “At Risk” faculty figuring out how to Remote-in to the classrooms via telepresence.

  3. Nick, you’ve been a good voice of sanity lately and deserve some credit.
    But I think it’s about time we started questioning the wisdom of continuing to try to slow the spread. It seems to me that all it accomplishes is spreading out the pain. It would be a lot better for the vast majority of people in the long run if we just stopped with most social distancing measures, focus on protecting the most vulnerable and taking our medicine.
    I suspect we will get to some kind of herd immunity before a vaccine is available. Seems to me the question is do we want that to take a year or more, or would it be better to get it over in a month or two, like what happens with most respiratory virus pandemics.
    Lives are not infinitely valuable, and if you place the hundreds of thousands of lives threatened by this virus against the damage already inflicted on billions of lives, I just don’t think it adds up.

    1. I think it’s a smart path to start looking at herd immunity and just keeping our hospitals from being overloaded.

      For some reason, a lot of people took the initial flatten the curve goal and then expanded that to stop the virus at all costs. That was never going to happen and prolonging it all (especially if the data suggesting it’s far more infectious and less lethal comes to pass) seems to be incurring a lot of unnecessary costs- both personal (mental issues, substance abuse, divorce, etc.) and economic (unemployment, debt going up, businesses all closing up due to economic uncertainty when they can open, etc.)

      The smart play seems to be keeping hospitals from being overwhelmed while getting young people out at the least to get herd immunity going.

      1. By a lot of people you mean yourself and others who were panicking a month ago right?

      2. wearingit
        April.27.2020 at 5:09 pm
        “I think…”

        No, you don’t.

      3. The fact is that even if a person, regardless of his/her age, gets even a mild case of Covid-19, survives, and supposedly recovers from this virus, they don’t fully recover. The lungs lose at least 20-30% of their capacity, because the Covid-19 virus kills off the lung tissue. There’s no such thing as herd immunity from Covid-19. It’s extremely infectious, and allowing young people go out and not do social distancing and not wear masks presents a real danger to everybody, regardless of their age. A lot of people don’t care, and do what they please anyhow, which is just plain disgusting.

        1. Got something to back those claims up? I’m pretty sure that everything you are claiming about the virus is either false or there is not enough data to draw a firm conclusion.

          1. The fact is that covid19 does cause diffuse alveolar damage. That has been demonstrated in both autopsies of those who have died and in lung capacity tests of those who have survived from hospital – and in the early stages of this disease via those ‘ground-glass’ images re lungs. There are peer-reviewed medical articles re all those.

            It has not yet been tested in those who have been proven to have had an asymptomatic case because quite simply at this point it is nearly impossible to prove that someone asymptomatic was ever really infected. The antibody tests are nowhere near precise enough to say that yet. Nor have those who were asymptomatic but who tested positive – as part of a competent contact tracing program (which never occurred here in the US) – followed up (yet) to assess whether there has been damage that has occurred that they are not yet aware of. Because the medical folks have been a bit busy dealing with the more immediate serious cases.

            So – formally – this is a big ‘we don’t yet know’ – with absolute evidence that the hypothesis is at least valid. That is far far different from the blanket reassurance by Top Men (all old) that there is nothing to worry about – now get back to work at your min wage job or incurring a massive personal debt load to keep the economy going to benefit us Top Men (all old). And given the perpetual lies and bullshit by the older generation re the younger generation, there is absolutely no reason on this Earth for the young to simply ‘trust’ the word of those who have proven themselves to be enslavers of the young.

        2. mapol, your stooopid ate your cites.

        3. Which proves it’s a terrifyingly insidious disease, given that the vast majority of people who have gotten mild cases appear not to have known they had it and are unaware of the horrible lung damage they are suffering. Kudos to you for pointing that out.

          1. The funny thing about reduced lung capacity is that it’s not quickly noticed unless you have a habit of using all of your lung capacity. So a runner may notice it more quickly. One area reported that the majority of their deceased patients had died from clot-related issues; microclotting in the lungs is never a good thing.

    2. Really?!? So you’re willing to accept the fact that many more lives will be lost as a consequence of giving up trying to slow the spread of the Covid-19 virus? Sorry, but I really don’t agree with you here. Had Donald Trump’s response not been a criminally irresponsible too-little/too-late response, we wouldn’t be in this mess right now.

  4. Seems the wrong question is being asked here. It’s not the likelihood of the youngs getting sick that’s the issue. It’s the greatly increased spread of the virus amongst the youngs that puts the olds at greater risk.

    As a simple example, if my kid went back to partial/full social integration, I wouldn’t want her to visit my parents at all until either my parents independently tested positive or there was a vaccine. I prefer that over totalitarian lockdown. But it’s a definite part of the calculus.

    That’s not an argument directly against Opening. But discussing only the effects on the carriers is the wrong question.

    1. There is a third possibility. That herd immunity develops more quickly and this virus just blends into the background with all the other viruses that are always around (and always killing the elderly).

      1. Given that there seem to be many more people with antibodies than originally assumed, this is likely true. Since flattening the curve minimally reduces the death toll, it’s time to let it rip. Those at risk can hunker down while the rest develop herd immunity, like the sheep you are.

        1. Just because people have anti-bodies to Covid-19 due to having been infected once doesn’t mean that they’re immune to getting infected again, and spreading it to other people.

      2. You think that it’s okay for younger people to kill off older people, and people with underlying conditions because a lot of these spoiled brats who are the sons and daughters of the ex-hippie/flower children don’t give a shit? You’re dead wrong here, Zeb.

        1. I’m not saying one way or another whether anything is OK. I’m saying that there is another possible scenario that may come to be.

          And, in some sense, yes it is OK for young people to kill off older people by spreading viruses. It happens every damn flu season. All the old people who die of a respiratory infection got it from someone. Are you really going to act like every case like that is essentially a murder?

          1. So, it’s okay for these spoiled young people to kill off older people, even those who are healthy, by spreading the Covid-19 virus around? That’s irresponsible thinking on your part, sorry. I don’t buy that!

        2. “You think that it’s okay for younger people to kill off older people,..”

          I think it’s OK for cowardly pieces of lefty shit like you to fuck off and die.

    2. Considering most college students are generally isolated from their family while at college, I’m not sure what you think the increased risk is here? Especially since by November we should be capable of deploying Serological tests on a widespread basis.

      1. I’m thinking Black Christmas.

      2. Who gives a shit about these spoiled brats who refuse to do what they’re supposed to do and engage in social distancing? They’re a bunch of spoiled brats, anyhow.

    3. No. The assumption is that those people at high risk need to protect themselves. The current martial law for everyone situation is inefficient and destructive. Narrow the focus!!!!

    4. I also have two in college. They need to be at college. And certainly as I’m paying in person pricing, doing online classes with curriculum and professors with zero experience doubly worsens the value.
      If they don’t see the grandparents in person, they can continue to call and even write.

      The overall point is that we know who is vulnerable to this virus. It is time now for the vulnerable to shoulder the responsibility and burdens of social distancing, and let the rest of society, those paying for social security and medicare benefits the elderly seem to like, get back to the business of having an economy.

      1. I agree. My point is simply that increasing contagion among the low risk folks increases the possibility of contagion among the high risk. I doubt that increase will result in the collapse of hospitals or a complete wipe of the senior class. But it will increase the number of deaths that might otherwise be prevented by stretching the contagion spread out longer.

        Of course, it’s the wrong argument to talk about number of deaths. I’m just saying the Jacket didn’t really address the counter-argument head-on.

      2. You’re dead wrong, Gasman! Everybody, regardless of age, needs to shoulder the responsibility of social distancing and wearing face masks when they go out in public.

        1. You’re full of shit, mapol. Go hide in a closet with the rest of the cowards.

          1. Ha ha ha! I’m doing anything but hiding in a closet, asshole. Go and fuck yourself.

  5. No, this cannot happen because Equality.

    Equality TM requires that every person be guaranteed the same outcomes and benefits, including protection of feelings. Even if little Suzie feels he has no significant risk, some 80 year old Karen across the country will feel threatened, and that is just not allowed.

  6. Boomer Gillespie wants young people to die.

    1. Boomer Gillespie wants young people to die to go back funding his SS and Medicare benefits.

      1. You’ve seen the numbers, mortality in the young is practically non-existant. Six weeks of covid at my pediatric hospital, and the young are still dying of all the usual stuff, but zero covid deaths, and only a handfull of admissions.

  7. She’s right, also, when she points out that however great it is to be able to conduct classes via Zoom and other videoconferencing services, such experiences are a far cry from the sort of intense profitable, learning experience students typically get from inhabiting traditional classrooms and moving around bustling campuses.

    The colleges want to open so students commit AND PAY tuition before the new paradigm of Zoom college takes over. It would be better for all, except college staff, if we were to keep colleges closed at least through end 2020.

    1. Ask anyone taking a lab class how well ‘zoom college’ really works? It doesn’t.

      Not to mention half the point of college is the social aspects. And not just with the other students, but with the faculty.


        Only around 10% of college grads are STEM, and only a fraction of those are doing lab courses.

        1. Then why are the others bothering with college?

          1. To steal the *FREE* money from FAFSA programs and if they’re lucky continue to steal *FREE* money by getting a pointless government job. It’s all about stealing…

            Lets get honest – how many students would be in college if they actually GOT a bill….!!! instead of a check….

            And to think all those stupid liberal majors would be instantly gone after that because who’s gonna pay a bill to learn how to be really stupid?

    2. I talked to my nephew the other day, and he is seriously pining for the chance to go back to a campus full of real people. He claims Tinder is dead and there is 0% chance of meeting a woman in person right now 🙂

      That’s the main reason many people pay the big tuition …

      1. Your nephew is going to have to accept the fact that he can’t go back to campus and meet women in person at this point. He seems to not give a shit about putting older people and vulnerable people at risk, like a lot of people his age do.

        1. Fuck off and die, mapol

          1. Go play in the Gaza Strip, underneath the Tanks and the bulldozers, Sevo.

        2. Then it is fair to say that you don’t care about the additional 133 million people who will be in danger if starvation from a global economic lockdown (not to mention the already 870 million people who are in danger of starvation, who will be hit even harder). This estimate is from the executive director of the UN World Food Program.

          The end result might be more additional deaths from starvation than deaths from the coronavirus.

  8. the president of Brown University, Christina Paxson, says “the reopening of college and university campuses in the fall should be a national priority.”

    What color is shit?

    A: Brown!!

    Wokest of the woke.

  9. I’m proud of Purdue and its president Mitch Daniels. My wife graduated from there.

    My son had applied for the fall (he chose another school) and we got an email from them basically saying, we’re going to open. The letter was very unafraid to state the facts about who is in danger and who isn’t. It was refreshingly logical and clear headed.

    1. Leave it to college presidents to be “refreshingly logical and clear headed” when doing so serves their financial interests.

      1. Mitch Daniels isn’t your typical college president.

        1. To Hell and back with Mitch Daniels! Bring on STORMY Daniels! She was able to teach “The Donald” a thing or two! Even though “The Donald” knows EVERYTHING (according to The Donald, at least).

          Stormy Daniels for college president!!! TEACH us all, Stormy Daniels!!!

        2. Daniels is what college presidents were maybe 20 years ago, a bit more moderate and a bit more sensible than the raving lunatics running many other colleges. But that doesn’t change his motivations or what his institution is doing to kids.

          1. I don’t really care about how hard the schools are fucking over the idiots majoring in English or Philosophy. Purdue is damn good engineering school, and that’s what my son is going into.

          2. It’s very easy to make blanket statements, but my man Mitch is doing exactly what I’d want him to do given the current state of higher education.

            Do you expect him to not be self-interested?

      2. Oh, you find him guilty of a thought crime. Who cares?

  10. The under 30s at my work are the ones desperately trying to stay home despite their insignificant risks. Almost universal.

    1. Apparently the propaganda worked. But the groundwork had been laid, since these are part of the Fragile Generation.

  11. Bring back college football.
    Don’t care about the rest.
    But you bastards already took March Madness, and I will absolutely riot if you continue that shit

  12. The people at risk from the virus are those over 60.

    The people least impacted economically by the virus are those over 60.

    The people running government these days are over 60.

    They would sacrifice the young generation out of their own myopic selfishness.

    1. So the people at risk from the virus are those over 60?
      So the people least impacted economically by the virus are over 60?
      So the people running government are over 60?

      So fucking what?

      It seems like a lot of people from your generation don’t care who they put at risk for the Covid-19 Virus. The fact that a lot of them don’t bother to put on face masks before heading out into the public, and the fact that a lot of them don’t care enough to obey the rules of social distancing indicates that THEY’RE the ones who’re being selfish!

      1. Fuck off and die, mapol

        1. Screw you, Sevo, you asshole!

      2. I’ll counter by saying the selfish people are the olds and the sicks that think the entire world should grind to a standstill because their small percentage of the population is in danger.

      3. And also point out that that same group of vulnerable people only have the longevity/quality of life that they do because they reap the benefits of a thriving economy.

    2. I think you mean least impacted by the reaction to the virus.

  13. Young people don’t vote, but they will forever see this as why you should never trust your elders. A bunch of baby boomers just decided randomly to shut down the economy because they were scared.

    Well some young people have rational minds and will turn out the boomers from politics. The ones that vote democrat and veer to the left are locked into the cult. They will watch as Reade gets kneecapped and not question it.

    1. Why vote when you can tweet, and occasionally march?

    2. Blow it out your ass, Case of the Mondays. You’re full of bulls**t.

      1. Fuck off and die, mapol.

        1. Eat me, Sevo.


    Why? So that students can waste more of their time learning useless crap? So that they can go deeper and deeper into debt? Brown University staying shuttered would be a God-sent for students.

    Paxson doesn’t care about the welfare of young people, she needs warm bodies to justify the existence of her massive organization and the government subsidies it receives.

  15. It sounds quite libertarian to argue that college students should be free to choose their own risk, in much the same way you can argue that 5-year olds should be free to buy liquor and guns and motorcycles. At some point I think you have to admit that some people are incapable of exercising informed consent due to diminished mental capacity and you really can’t leave it up to someone of diminished mental capacity to decide whether or not they’re of diminished mental capacity. College students are notorious for being too damn ignorant to grasp how ignorant they are. Well, maybe you could re-open trade schools and community colleges and university courses for STEM students, I’d be wary of opening Ivy League schools and for any students majoring in anything with “Studies” in the name.

    1. That’s a fine argument to make. So let’s increase the age of majority to 30 and keep these morons from voting.

      However, anybody who can vote should be able to lil themselves by being stupid.

    2. A lot of college kids today are willfully ignorant and stupid–inotherwords, they just don’t care who they put at risk. If these young adults are old enough to go to college, and to hold down jobs and work, they’re old enough to understand why the rules of social distancing and wearing face masks when they go out in public were put in place. These are hard and fast rules that are NOT meant to be broken, by anybody.

      1. Oh, fuck off. We are putting millions at risk by destroying their lives and livelihoods. There are two sides to the equation.

      2. “These are hard and fast rules that are NOT meant to be broken, by anybody.”

        Cowards go hide someplace.

  16. Well you have to do something with them.

    Go to school, get a job, join the Navy, for goodness sake anything.

    Except those are not current options.

  17. First, the total issue is backwards in aim:
    The government(s) should not be in the business of ‘allowing’ anyone to do anything.
    There are certain activities which the government(s) should properly prohibit; crimes of person or property against another.
    Other than that, the government(s) might offer the population the best information available, but that presumes the government(s) might be trusted to be other than full of shit and comprised of self-serving bureaucracies.

    1. +100000000000000

  18. JFree?
    Fuck off and die.

    1. You don’t even know how to stalk correctly. How pathetic is that?

  19. 26.5 unemployed.

    Even if the fatality rate was 10%, even if every hospital in the country would be overwhelmed, this shutdown still goes too far.

    What we need is a complete, unrestricting reopening.

    1. Even with the minor lifting of restrictions announced by Governor Wolf here in PA, I know a number of people, including a close relative, who have been called back to work. Construction-related jobs, mostly.

      If we can get from minor lifting to major lifting …

  20. “What we need is a complete, unrestricting reopening.”

    Correct; the governments have no authority to ‘plan’ any ‘reopening’.
    The governments need to simply announce the end to any restrictions on trade RIGHT NOW!

  21. Hannah T. ANderson paycheck was for 1500 dollars… All i did was simple online work from comfort at home for 3-4 hours/day that I got from this agency I discovered over the internet and they paid me for it 95 bucks every hour… More Details

  22. As long as one takes precaution there is nothing wrong with attending the university and colleges. But at the same time, the government should also take responsibility to take necessary measures to prevent spreading the disease.

    1. “the government should also take responsibility to take necessary measures to prevent spreading the disease.”

      Cowards need to hide.

      1. Sure, young people can go back to work etc.

        But if they get someone sick through negligence, they should also be held responsible, as that is clearly an initiation of force.

  23. The social distancing of six feet or more from each other, and wearing face masks when out in public should still be in place, and rigidly enforced, as should huge gatherings and crowds.

    1. Bullshit.
      Cowards need to hide.

    2. Nope how about you just take care of yourself?

  24. That is true, young people have to work.

  25. Nick Gillespie thinks he belongs to the ruling class, deciding who should be allowed to be free and who should be locked up – for their own protection. He now endorses an age requirement for exercising liberty. You didn’t find that in the Declaration of Independence, Nick, nor in the Constitution.

    Poor Nick, he needs to find another line of work. He pretends he is writing about free minds and free markets, when he is really indulging himself in the pleasure of prescribing restraints on liberty. For shame!!

  26. “Restraints on liberty” “Not found in the Constitution” It always amazes me when people fail to understand that it was impossible for the Founding Fathers to have anticipated every possible situation when they penned the Constitution, and this is why they added the Tenth Amendment giving powers to the states. Perhaps if governors had instituted stay-at-home requirements during the 1918-20 Spanish flu pandemic, the consequences would not have been so deadly. The pandemic started out as a mild flu for the first few months, followed by a killer strain that cost 660,000+ Americans their lives. As historian Paul Kennedy warns, “History never repeats itself exactly, but it often deals harsh blows to those who ignore it entirely.”

  27. Without an effective testing program in place we’re just going to end up with a bunch of Typhoid Marys, who don’t know what they are wandering around infecting others. Without testing, this is also about the “choice” to infect others.


    Based on what evidence are you saying that Nick? It’s an odd departure from the relatively common libertarian pov that traditional classroom schooling is kind of a scam. I’m not at all convinced that moving around bustling campuses achieves much but a robust social life, and that in terms of education, zoom/online may be just as good. If nothing else, we should get some unintended experimental data out of this situation.

  29. That would be ageist.

  30. Great study related post TopStudytips

  31. Hope soon it will be possible to attend colleges and universities again. I hate distance learning, given the fact I’m getting my degree in programming. Therefore, I have to ask to assist me with my coding assignments otherwise it would be practically impossible to catch up without proper explanations.

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